I'm obviously dense, because I just don't understand the problem. I mean...I don't understand how someone (whoever it was) thinks that they can make a hastagged link actually work, because the only people that would see it would be your followers; it wouldn't show up in any of the searched streams, because it would be unique.

Then, I don't understand how your tweet, assuming you've used the hashtag #kindle, doesn't show up in the #kindle stream, unless, as someone else said, Twitter is using ROR (Twitter's still running on Ruby on Rails, isn't it?) to somehow screen spam, but as someone who uses various and sundry Twitter tools, I've yet to see that in action. All those ebook hashtag feeds are, with all due respect, just fountains of spam. Utterly ineffective, BTW, if you want my opinion, unless there's something of genuine interest, e.g., "PW gave my book 5 stars, review at blab-blab." I admit I'll pass up the "check out my book" spams.

However, that is opinion and not part of the answer. You're using Twitter directly, not a Twitter tool, I understand? I honestly don't remember, as I don't use Twitter directly any longer, does Twitter still return your own tweets to you in a search? And when you hit, "all," how many tweets do you get back? But you have Hootsuite shortened urls, so are you using Hootsuite, then? And using a Hootsuite search, or an actual direct twitter search?

n.b.: interesting note, I think; when I just tested the regular, direct-Twitter interface, and did a search on "#kindle," the top 100 or so results I got didn't even HAVE the hashtagged word in the tweets, but had "kindle" as part of the username or something else. I suspect that your tweet is simply getting lost in the ocean of tweets, as I think I said earlier. In fact, I get a completely different set of search results than I do from my Hootsuite account for the identical search at the near-identical time. Clearly, sponsoring is skewing Twitter's search results, ala Google. FWIW.

Hitch

Hitch, I'm just making a hash (pun intended) of this. I don't know if Twitter is the be and end all of marketing, but at least it's something I can do. And I'm meeting some nice writers. It's all good.

To me this problem of mine seems so simple. I've got say, 100 followers on Twitter. If I tweet:

My 100 followers see it and since it's a link they can click on it. Everything is copacetic. BUT they are only 100 people and they are all doing the same thing as me (marketing). So we re-tweet each other and commiserate and as far as that goes it's all good. But still we are only 100 people!

Now, what should happen is my tweet should go to my stream yes, but ALSO to the #kindle stream, where there are zillions of tweets. Tweets mostly by writers granted, but the stream is also being looked at by zillions of people with kindles looking for a good read. But my tweet does not get into the #kindle stream.

So yes, my tweet gets seen by my 100 followers, and their followers if they retweet my tweet, but the great big ocean of #kindle I am shut out of. (And others are not!)

And lastly, the same tweet as described above WITHOUT the http://amzn.to/1adU4Li goes to my stream of followers AND the #kindle stream.

In other words, yes, Twitters computers have deemed me a spammer (of a certain degree) and have shortened the leash I'm on by disallowing my tweets with shortened links to my ebooks go through to the hashtag streams. (Now if I have a tweet with a link to a major magazine or something, it will go through normally to my stream and the hash tag stream.)

Additionally, anything I tweet through Buffer does not get through to anything. Like I said, it seems they're tightening the leash on me.